


Slugging Along

by LlmFr



Series: Magpies are both good and bad [4]
Category: Iron Man (Movies), Marvel, Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: Assassin Tony Stark, Depression, He’s just tryin to live his life, Hydra (Marvel), Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Tony Stark Needs a Hug, Winter Soldier Tony Stark
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-03-05
Updated: 2021-03-05
Packaged: 2021-03-18 21:48:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 791
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29864541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/LlmFr/pseuds/LlmFr
Summary: Tony’s in his 20’s living his precarious life making all the drama mags rich and suffering for it.(This is part of a series which shall never be completed but is free for adoption with the exception that someone’s send it to me because I’d love to see it. For more context read the series summary. These are all semi-independent.)
Series: Magpies are both good and bad [4]
Series URL: https://archiveofourown.org/series/2048414
Kudos: 5





	Slugging Along

**Author's Note:**

> This is placed just after Tony’s officially released into the world as a “Puppet” with a side job as a Magpie. Which he doesn’t do either. So he’s trying to make it impossible for Hydra to corner him via being impossible to get alone. 
> 
> This has consequences on his mental health.

After cutting ties some part of Tony just kept an eye over his back. Call it paranoia but fighting back into the eye of the public is best described as wielding a double edged sword with all the finesse of a toddler. He honesty just doesn’t have any more leverage for his safety other than people are watching and Hydra hates eyes in their way.

It’s a precarious wall that he’s set up that has him more often then not keeping a titanium throwing knife under the bulky hood of his watch and a gun perched by his ankle at all times.

His greatest defense is that there’s always a witness.

Keep in front of a camera, makes scandals, parade like an attention whore. Make sure everyone knows exactly where you are and what you’re doing with a questionably obtained photo to prove it and the boogeyman won’t come.

At least that’s the theory but you know what they say: You're always right until someone says you’re wrong.

So yeah, his reputation is rather bloated and ugly but at least it serves a purpose.

He’s not going to lie however that sometimes it almost feels like a last hurrah when he’s too drunk to tell his foot from his knee and with some pretty-thing-paid-to-be-pretty hanging on his arms. To just take a moment and make it all about him and shove himself in all their faces before some ballsy sniper puts a bullet in his head. Get a porno movie made or two, win a million dollar jackpot counting cards then admit there was an ace up your sleeve, get shit-faced drunk at your own award ceremony before some valiant speech of how you "wouldn’t be there without all you guys watching every step of it." before racing to the loo to purge your hateful stomach.

Sometimes though it all catches up when he can’t go to the bathroom without someone else there to bother him about being the infamous Tony Stark. Or when he systematically checks every stray he brings to bed for weapons under the guise of groping. Even through something as simple as eating his paranoia has him pecking through for the smallest discoloration then throwing his nose up at the chef when it’s there.

Safe to say, these days, the great Tony Stark, 4th Magpie Of Hydra, world class genius, is a paranoid, stuck-up, drunk whore of a celebrity and is unrepentant of it. Sadly he’s still a better person than he was before, becoming what amounts to a package of America’s worst vices.

He tries to avoid Stark Industries as much as possible. Less because of the danger of solitude and more because he just doesn’t like it. It reminds him too much of those days when his thirteen-year-old battered self was sitting exhausted after conditioning with a pencil and paper, told to make something to take a life a second in silence. Which, in all honesty, is a pretty fucking terrible idea but he figured as long as his face is plastered in some kind of teen gossip then he was fine. He wasn’t wrong but it was when the board got suspicious of his heritage for the third time that he had to pick up the pace. Come up with brand new, innovating, _exhausting_ , weapons for the great country of America as the patriot son of Howard Stark.

He ended up holed up in his lab for the entire week after that. It didn’t help that his time management was absolute shit with the one clock in his workshop perpetually broken. It was an absurd limbo of anxiety and reprieve. To finally be alone but knowing someone could come in from everywhere at any time. Sometimes when he got too caught up in his work he fell into that cloudy headspace so very familiar, drowning in calculations and at scary moments, habitually signing his blueprints with "Heil Hydra".

By that point Tony just doesn’t know why he’s living this way. Is it all even worth it?

Really it just put the question of whether surviving is living on stand. Sure he could convince himself this is all some valiant ruse to undermine Hydra, to one day thwart the end of all things good like freedom and explosions. But really, at twenty years, he’s just too world weary. He’s seen death, caused death, tortured, killed, manipulated, created, destroyed. He’s done it all. And he knows the biggest blow he can make, that he’s willing to make really, is to simply be his own fuck-up.

It was no grand realization or an epiphany long coming, there was no Jesus on a toast or talking rat. There wasn’t anything when he finally got out of his haze.

**Author's Note:**

> Ive read some fics where Tony’s Playboy days are treated either as some big act or a complete misunderstanding on the public’s part, making him out to be secretly virtuous or otherwise just a nerd trying to do his nerd thing but honestly, Tony’s personality just doesn’t seem to line up with that? 
> 
> Personally, I always thought that if Tony were to have to keep up a playboy act without actually being a playboy, he’d still try and make the best of it. Like, yanno, getting drunk, sleeping around, etc. 
> 
> Like, if you gotta have “fun” to live, why not have fun? 
> 
> Then again, one can get burned out and frustrated.


End file.
